DISQUS

Great piece. I would generally agree with all of your points. But, something worth adding is that good marketing is about reducing the barriers between product and consumer, delivering the "message" at a frequency or impedence level the audience can accept.



Do technical folks look forward to that next glossy brochure or datasheet they get at a tradeshow or in a direct mail piece? I don't think so. Do they like unformatted, text-heavy technical details or videos they can play on their next iPod/PSP/etc.? Probably so.



(note: I say this also knowing that other audiences require the the glossies as much or more...)



With our F5 developer program and community, we've embraced this approach and the great things the Channel 9 team is doing. Transparent, engaging, conversational, and - most important - substance without bulls***.



Keep up the great thoughts and perspectives on looking beyond the obvious when it comes to marketing.



Cheers,

- Jeff

Robert, thanks again for stopping by yesterday. We really enjoyed your visit and great discussion.

This is a fascinating dialogue. It also highlights how the role of a network is changing quickly. The notion of how many "9's" a company needs is an interesting - and critical - discussion. Need varies based upon the business requirements and budget tolerance.

But, here's a different angle on the cost factor. What if you could build an application that ensures total uptime during datacenter/app updates while automating the process through app and network integration? The cost savings in CLI/management effort is significant with total error reduction (i.e. downtime).

Or, if the device is smart enough to read and understand the datastream and sanitize it to ensure that sensitive information never leaves the datacenter, what's that worth? (think credit card numbers? SS#s?) It's kind of like those Mastercard ads... Cost of servers? $$$... Cost of network hardware? $$$... Avoiding the costs of telling your 30,000 customers that you *may* have leaked their credit card numbers? Priceless. ;-)

We've got an iRule on DevCentral that does this. (http://devcentral.f5.com).

We're getting to the point where the value of applications running on smart network devices can more than cover the cost of the network gear (and servers, for that matter).

Uptime and fault tolerance are the foundation to deploying any web app or service. Using more advanced features (APIs, rules, etc.) offer a completely different way of looking at cost/value/business criticality.

- Jeff